Colour help

[Bea1 Profile]

Hi there I have enclosed my photo as I'm having a bit of difficulty trying to get the colours right in the photo and make them look all cohesive. I like the look of the vines but the grass area is not looking that great and it looks blurred a bit. What would you suggest? I have also tried to fix the space around the little boy trying using the smoothe out feature but it still comes up looking like this. Again what would you suggest? Many thanks Bea

[eadams Profile]

Hi Bea1,

What a beautiful little boy!

I think you did a very good job with this image. Was it a composite? The resolution is low so it's hard to tell, even when zooming in. If it were my image I would crop it below the blurred vines on the right. I really like the background and sky, it's got good depth of field, but the little boy is rather lost in the big picture, and the blurry vine detracts from the image.

Regarding the colors - I'm not sure what you mean by making them cohesive, but if you choose one of the SPE effects from the color category, you should be able to give the overall image the look you desire. In the example below I went for a less vibrant look using the effect "Contrast" by Tony in the Color Balance group of effects.

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[SunnyKid Profile]

Hi there. I do see what you mean by the colors. I am an artist and learned color theory in college.

First of all, I totally agree with Eadams that the cropping helps. There was too much tree and lime green in the photo. That brings everything into balance.

I threw some red and yellow layers into the photo in Photoshop. It is just two layers with a misty area painted on areas of the layer. I changed the style so yellow is linear burn and red is hue. If you can find a way to make layers and set the color layer style, you can adjust the color outcome of your photo.

I don't know if SPE can do that. If it can, awesome. But that is how you color balance a photo in image software.

I forgot to add the most important thing. I took the red from the kilt with a color picker. I took the yellow from what he has in his hands. I erased the areas of his skin, hair and clothing so they didn't change his coloring.

I also put the red around his body and the yellow in the sky knowing that when I played around looking for the right layer style it would eventually pop with what it needed to be.

You have to use colors pulled from the photo or they will not work. That is keeping to the color palette. I hope this isn't too confusing. I've been doing this for about fifteen years and it's second nature to me. I hope this helps you.

He is adorable and beautiful.

Sunny

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[Bea1 Profile]

Thanks he is a cutie, taken on our wedding day a few months ago Wow eeek ok there is a lot to learn about colouring..I will go and have a look this w-end as I can see this will take some time I do want the vines to be the green that I originally did as I like that awesome pop of colour. I will go and have a look at SPE too and Yes completely agree with the cropping which Ive now done. Thanks about balancing the colours, yes I like the reds and yellow you have done. Can you tell me how do I shade that area around our son so there is not a big white shadow around him? The only thing now with your photo is the little man looks like he been placed into the photo, to me it doesn't look that natural? Thoughts? Thanks so much for your help, Bea

[eadams Profile]

I really like the color change done by SunnyKid. The greens in the original photo are beautiful, but they are obviously created by increasing saturation and/or tone to make them pop, and I think it is one reason why the colors in the original photo didn't look cohesive, as you said. I thought that the original image was a composite because of it.

If you are only using SPE, one way to get rid of the lighter area around the kilt and legs is by using the erase tool. When you start SPE, there is a video explaining how to erase things from your image. In this case, you would be erasing the light patches of grass and replacing them with cloned patches from darker grass areas.